Hubspot’s Global Dir. of Customer Success on how AI will make CSMs more valuable strategic advisors to customers

AI's world takeover tour is picking up fans across nearly every function, but companies are giving special attention to how AI can support the important and intensive effort of interacting with customers. Recent surveys show 77% of organizations are already using or exploring AI for customer service, and 86% of leaders say it improved their ability to scale customer service operations. As a high-touch form of customer service in tech, customer success is a key target for new efficiencies and ways of working.

Daphne Costa Lopes, Global Director of Customer Success at HubSpot, offers a sharp perspective on how AI can propel CS beyond old limits. With over a decade steering teams that support over $3 billion in ARR, Lopes frames AI as a "co-pilot" for CSMs.

"I think AI is going to be everywhere in the customer journey and it's going to be the co-pilot of the CSM," Lopes says. "If the CSM needs to jump on a call with a customer tomorrow, instead of spending hours to prepare, they're going to pull in customer summaries of everything that's happening and it's going to be much easier, faster for CSMs to be able to get up and running with customers."

CSM supercharger: AI, Lopes argues, will make the CSM role much stronger. "It's going to change everything. It's going to supercharge the best CSMs and the people who don't adopt are going to be left behind because the best CSMs are going to become faster, better, and more effective while they just become stagnant in comparison." Industry research supports her view, showing AI can slash ticket resolution times and automate routine tasks, freeing CSMs for more demanding work.

AI as master planner: "The quick digestion and consolidation of information as well as being able to summarize things for the customer success manager," is a capability she labels a "game changer". She also points to AI’s knack for understanding customer needs by "scraping all the calls that the customer had with the sales rep" and helping craft custom plans. She adds, "For creating success plans, you can use the network effect to learn which customers have the same goals as these customers that I'm signing up now. What have they done? What has been successful?"

Retain and reinforce: Beyond planning, AI also powerfully strengthens how CSMs maintain accountability and communicate ongoing value. Lopes explains how AI can proactively monitor engagement and streamline reporting: "You can have AI looking at the actions that the customer takes and then triggering actions for you or tasks for the customer or reminders. You can be quicker to hold your customers accountable and also communicate value. AI-generated EBRs already are a reality. It might not be the final version that your CSM puts in front of the customer, but it's 80% there. So instead of spending three, four hours creating a slide deck, they spend an hour really deep diving into the data and being able to have a much more strategic conversation."

Higher strategy: What excites Lopes most is AI’s power to help CS reach its long-held strategic goals. "I've been in customer success for nearly 15 years and every time that we talk about customer success we're talking about strategic advisor. How can we be more strategic, how can we be more proactive? But we've never had the proper tooling to do it," she says. AI delivers these tools, potentially lifting every CSM. "If they could repurpose the 30, 40 minutes that it takes to prepare for a call today, preparing to have a strategic conversation, I think the conversation would be elevated. The value of the CSM is elevated and the value to the customer is elevated, creating a great experience across the board for all customers."